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A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant
A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant Author:Edward Caird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 327 CHAPTER III. THE FIRST PERIOD OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY DESCARTES AND SPINOZA. nHBISTIANITY, as we have seen, implicitly contained in it the idea of a reconciliation of the ancie... more »nt dualism. By it the opposition of matter and form, which wras insoluble to Plato and Aristotle, and the opposition of subject and object, which was insoluble to the Stoics and Epicureans, were alike transcended. When God was conceived as self-revealing, he required no foreign matter upon which he might act, and in which he might realise his will. When the external object was conceived as spiritual, or as the revelation of spirit, it could no longer be regarded as something entirely foreign to, and hidden from, the thought of man.. The unity in both cases embraced the difference, and made its terms transparent to each other. But this idea of unity and reconciliation was in the first instance presented in an abstract and undeveloped form. It was at first confined to the church, and did not penetrate the world; it became the source and spring of religious life, but cast no new light upon nature or politics. And just because it did not yet cast any light upon them, or connect itself / with them, it deprived them of all import and value for the spirit of man. Hence the very doctrine of . reconciliation itself gave rise to a new opposition between the world and the church, the secular and the sacred, nature and spirit. The general idea of the reconciliation of the divine and the human was set against all particular illustrations or manifestations of it. The spirit of modern science, which finds the simplest phenomenon interesting, because it sees law and order everywhere, and the spirit of modern poetry, to which nature is the transparent vesture of divinity, were equally alien to the mediaeval mind. Nature was condemned as...« less